U.S. needs young immigrant workers

With declining birth rates and an aging population, we won’t have a workforce capable of supporting older Americans “as they gobble up entitlement benefits,” says Jordan Weissmann in the Atlantic. We need to revise our immigration policy to ensure “we have enough young workers flowing into the country,” he says.

5 Responses

Hand in hand with the unsustainable notion that everyone can gain benefits within the ever expanding pie theory of economics (where everyone gets more as their slices become larger, without taking anything away from others) in a resource depleting world, is the notion that we must have ever more people to support those who have already been born. The math for this templet does not hold up in the long run, as the pie stops growing and the number of people it must sustain increases. We are, like in so many other aspects of our reality, just running out the clock while those who are in a position to get, milk the system to get while the getting is good. In as much as such mindsets do not address the many problems their existence is responsible for causing, we are not going to achieve a symbiotic relationship with the closed ecosystem that has nurtured and sustained us (the planet Earth) so far, and eventually, like all mindless creatures that are fed too much and protected from predators, we are going to breed ourselves to the edge of, if not the reality of, extinction. It is well past the time when Humanity can exist only in the exigencies of the here and now, as only a few of us seem to recognize society is chasing a runaway train, on foot.

ann – Two answers to your question (from the perspective of the rich) – 1) so that we become so overpopulated that the people themselves demand to abolish the minimum wage, and 2) that the precious rich aren’t required to pay more taxes to support their former workers once they get kicked out out for being too old. The rub here is that most whites won’t come here for lower benefits than what they have in their own countries, so immigration will be largely from the non-white third world. This will drive the right-wingers absolutely NUTS (as evidenced by their recent efforts to eliminate abortion and birth control, which would have increased the white population, since white women are still in the majority). Fortunately, this was soundly rejected by the voters.

For once I actually pretty much agree with everybody, but ann said it most succinctly. Why in the world would we even think of encouraging more immigration at this point when we have such a high unemployment rate. Also why are we spending money educating foreign students in STEM fields instead of our own kids, particularly at the graduate level? At the graduate level 80% of the cost of educating students is paid directly or indirectly through taxes. I know first hand that what has happened in the past with foreign STEM graduates who are granted work visa after they granduate is that they spend a few years here getting practical work experience, sending money they earn back to their home countries instead of spending it here, then they go back home and use the education and experience we paid for to compete against us. It NUTS!!!